Biden Says Agenda Backed by Midterm Voters Is Reducing Inflation

Nancy Cook
·3 min read
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(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden said promising inflation figures on Thursday indicated that his economic agenda was working, highlighting developments that were seen as a liability just two days earlier, before Democrats lodged a better-than-predicted performance in midterm elections.

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“Just today we learned inflation came down last month. Mainstream economists are saying this is a really positive sign of the resilience of the economic recovery,” Biden said at a Democratic National Committee event in Washington. “It’s going to take time to get inflation back to normal levels. We could see setbacks along the way, I realize that. But we are laser focused on it.”

Biden said midterm voters had backed those efforts and that Americans would see more changes in the coming months as his policies took effect.

“I know it’s going to take time to implement our entire economic agenda, which we already passed, and for folks to feel it in their day-to-day lives. But I think folks are going to see it in the next few months,” he added. “That’s what’s going -- and I think that’s what they voted for.”

While inflation is still elevated, the fresh data showed consumer price gains cooled by more than expected last month. That’s a welcome sign that the fastest pace of increases in four decades is easing, which might give the Federal Reserve room to slow its aggressive rate increases.

Read more: US Inflation Slows More Than Forecast, Gives Fed Downshift Room

The White House has blamed the rise in prices over the past year on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and supply chain snarls, which have driven up costs across the globe, and had sought to bring down the price of gasoline heading into Tuesday’s midterm elections, most notably by tapping the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Economists outside of the White House, however, have piled blame on the Biden administration’s big pandemic-era fiscal stimulus, which accelerated consumer demand beyond supply, and faulted the Fed for acting too slowly to raise interest rates, which are intended to cool the economy and bring price growth back down.

It’s unclear, however, what impact the administration’s policies have had. The consumer price index was up 7.7% from a year earlier, the smallest annual advance since the start of the year, on easing costs of used cars, medical care and apparel, according to details from the Labor Department.

In recent weeks, the White House has emphasized the president’s record on jobs and the passage of the infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act as key parts of Biden’s economic agenda. Republicans continue to try to center their critique of Biden’s economic record on inflation.

With Republicans inching toward control of the House, but the Senate still up for grabs, Biden said he was willing to reach across the aisle.

“I’m prepared to work with Republicans. But the American people have made it clear they expect Republicans to work with me as well,” he said. “The American people sent a message that they want us to work together.”

Polls in the run-up to the election showed voters put inflation and the economy as their top concerns, but exit polls suggest social issues played a bigger factor than thought.

--With assistance from Reade Pickert, Ramsey Al-Rikabi and Jordan Fabian.

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